


Dormant Waters (The Fuck Morality Tales Remix)

by Runespoor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternian Culture, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/M, Feferi Peixes for a B-ETT-ER world!, M/M, Multi, Post-Game, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:43:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a new world, and there are moral debts Feferi wants to settle. Most are hers to repay, gladly. </p><p>There's one she intends to collect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dormant Waters (The Fuck Morality Tales Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/gifts).
  * Inspired by [“that’s where you will get to see / everything the water can be”](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/8087) by Sour_Idealist. 



> With immense gratitude to Zeen, for a much-needed and last-minute beta. All mistakes are my own, because I couldn't leave well enough alone.

Your matesprit’s moirail has a saying, about steering clear of dormant waters. 

When you said you didn’t know land-dwellers had proverbs about the sea, she explained that it was a warning for lowbloods that they should stay out of the way of sea-dwellers. 

There were other stories with that same moral, like _the tale of the mustard-blood who went to sail the seas, only to be shipwrecked and almost drowned. He was rescued by the sea-dweller prince, who fell in pity with him.  
_

_The mustard-blood was overjoyed, yet could not miss the way his savior sighed and raged. When he gently wondered why such a fine, pity-worthy troll could not confide his troubles to a moirail, the prince confessed that his own moirail was unfaithful to him._

_Touched by his matesprit’s torment, the mustard-blood resolved to avenge his lover’s pain: he would gain the trust of the false moirail, and slay her when she rested. He entered into the service of the sea-dweller’s moirail, in a beautiful underwater palace the mustard-blood could only reach because the prince gifted him with magical fins and gills._

As the story goes, _when the mustard-blood was about to carry out his crime, hunched over the unfaithful moirail’s recuperacoon, she opened her eyes and stopped his weapon, forewarned of the attempt on her life._ It turns out that _the sea-dwelling moirails were never estranged, and social balance is restored when the two moirails devour the_ uppity _lowblood._

You never liked that story any more than Aradia’s tone suggested she did, and you liked it even less when she told it over coffee, with your hand resting on Sollux’ warmer hand. Sollux’ back went stiff, and you found yourself chewing on a lock of your hair, trying to suck out the salt - though you’d been out of the water for five hours now, and your hair was long dry.

The moral that sea-dwellers affairs got land-dwellers killed, you wouldn’t object to it on principle. On Alternia -- on old Alternia, before Karkat and Aradia and the others remade your universe, that piece of wisdom preserved lives. Even if you’d wanted to protest that things were different on New Alternia - which they _were_ , that wasn’t just you being an airhead - you wouldn’t have, because Aradia was murdered by the hemospectrum, and because from what you remembered of your ex-moirail’s fanatical rants about glorious history, her commentary was spot on. She was as much of a history buff as Eridan, in her quietly anti-colorist way.

It was the specifics of the story that made you squirm. 

You felt as though your hand was heavy with the weight of history, crushing Sollux’, unable to look at him. You remembered what you’d learned of your ancestor and Sollux’ ancestor, and felt sick in the back of your throat, guilty to your soul. You met Aradia’s gaze and wondered if she’d read the same logs you had, if she knew about what the Condesce had done to the Helmsman.

Holding your matesprit’s hand seemed obscene, suddenly, but you didn’t move, didn’t back down.

She smiled, tilting her head so you wouldn't miss the large, tenacious-looking curves of her horns or the way they gleamed when she aimed them at you, and declared that she was 0kay! with you being Sollux’ matesprit. 

They’d dragged you to have coffee here so Aradia could approve Sollux’ choice of a matesprit and threaten you about hurting him, you realized. It took you aback; you didn’t expect them to be so traditional. But it meant Aradia approved of _you_ , being Sollux’ matesprit. She trusted you with his weakness.

Your earfins spread in relief, as if you were sinking into the sea after a week of being away.

Sollux was swearing crassly under his voice, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. 

*  
Sollux used Aradia’s word to evoke your moods.

“Is this a dormant waterth moment, printheth?” he asked, an eyebrow raised, when you were arguing and he thought that you were being too fucking preciiouth, his pronunciation becoming thicker when he was upset. Just because you pitied him from the bottom of your soul didn’t mean you were not aware that your matesprit was a douchebag. 

“Even dormant waters have to break into a shitstorm sometimes,” he would tell you when you’d been going over the newest treaty with New Earth for what felt like the fiftieth time and there had been no significant alteration to their demands since the third reading, and none of your ministers was willing to give one inch and all sides were looking at you like you were a charming and innocent fluffy white animal with no idea what it was doing, and you found yourself fantasizing about tidal waves ravaging the Earth, about extending your ministers’ lifelines while you dunk them again and again under the water, and you’d smashed through your desk in frustration, again.

Your ministers occasionally nag you about finding a moirail. They have a point: they may know nothing of the former Alternia, but Her Imperious Condescension’s ascent into warmongering madness pursued you into your day terrors.

But so far there was no-one who made you want to wear diamonds, whose words sparked the same serenity in you as you see on Sollux’ face after a night out with Aradia. 

There was no-one you would want to be able to calm you down. For now you’d rather stay angry, and follow Sollux’ advice that you take a night off government work.

Nights you and Sollux were not slaving away for the future of New Alternia were rare enough that when you did get to play hooky, you invariably ended up going out. Sollux wasn't a big fan of people and noise, but he knew as well as you did that if you stayed in, you would get called on duty for something that either your team could take care of, or could wait a few hours. And if it turned out to be _reelly_ urgent - New Earth invading urgent - Aradia and Kanaya knew where to find you.

When you’ve been in that state of mind where oceans rising and eyeless creatures dragging your subjects into the abyss pounded on your temples like the pressure of twenty thousand tons of water, you needed to get to a place that would replace that pounding.

Music was almost nothing like the sea, and you cut off Sollux with a kiss when he first started to fumble a comparison between the two, kissing him so you wouldn’t laugh, your heart swelling with untold pity that he’d never know what he was talking about. Music could not crush a being’s lungs; it could not feed a nation, and when you died your body couldn’t be given back to the music. Your species wasn’t born from it. Dancers’ movements were far more transient than the tides.

In these moods you needed to get away from the sea, or you didn’t know what you might do. 

Just sneaking incognito to a club was almost an adventure in itself for the Benevolence of sanitized New Alternia. She was not supposed to have spent the first six sweeps of her life on a world without grown-ups where it was eat or be eaten, or to have gone through a universe-destroying game on the cusp of secondary pupation. 

As far the people of the Benevolence knew, the young Empress had led a sheltered life, and the gravest threats she faced were stolen photographs from celebrity scoop-hunters (and the risk of an assassination attempt, but no-one talks about it in your earshot, and it would be the least of your worries even if you weren’t the Witch of Life: when magic or gamebreaking devices weren’t involved, outright killing a troll was gratifyingly difficult. Anti-troll sentiment on New Earth had taken to calling your species _cockroaches_.)

It was something of an adventure for you too. 

The city that your friends imagined up stretched over the land; it was bigger than any such population hub on old Alternia, Aradia told you, and you had grown up in solitude. Your government was comprised of more grown-ups than you'd met in your entire life before the game, and there were more of them in the streets. Adult trolls inhabited New Alternia as well as younger ones did, and they were all your subjects.

The landscape changed as you walked, too, the wide, rounded communal constructions of white stone around your palace, with their walls enclosing trees and fountains, and their bright mosaic colors of their portal to represent the multiple inhabitants, grown-ups and kids alike – it was a rare hive that didn’t flaunt three or four colors, from heavy rust to cold purple, and all the range of sparkling greens and blues. 

As you went further in, buildings grew taller, pressed together as if to gather momentum and reach toward the sky together, so high that you had to crane your neck to get a glimpse of their roofs. The streets narrowed, the cloth-and-wood lanterns of rich neighborhoods were replaced with the rigid stems of fluorescent material of the streetlights the Assembly chose, ghostly brightness taking over the warm shadows.

Colors slowly washed away, chalk and brick superseded by the grays of stone and metal that are more familiar to you from films of Earth cities, and the door of each building often went blank, hiding the blood shade of its myriad of inhabitants behind slate-grey anonymity rather take the risk of vandalism. 

In some parts of the city, you knew, doors were a piece of cloth of one color, and a sigil drawn on it in blood. Those were gang lands, trolls who lived in violence and destitution and a culture so close to your childhood world’s it made your heart squeeze in longing. That these gangs covered the gamut of the former hemospectrum didn't assuage your guilt.

They were your people, and it was your duty to ensure that everyone could live in peace and safety.

The culture that New Earth encouraged you to develop came with its own faults. Jane told you that on old Earth, capitalism worked as a limited yet effective form of Alternian hemospectrum discrimination, though based on skin rather than blood color, and as the brown-skinned heir of an Occidental monetary empire, she was something of an exception. 

She was working to change all of that on New Earth now, but when you strolled through the capital city of your planet and you compared the vast hives shared by two dozen of trolls near your palace, and the limited space each flat could afford its meager handful of residents, you thought capitalism had downsides of its own. 

Your habitual club was a middling one, neither so select that you might bump into the charge of one of your ministers or be recognized as the Empress, but neither was it so run-down that you felt like you were appropriating something that wasn’t yours; slumming, Karkat called it. 

Those were your reasons; Eridan's were presumably that a club that was too high-end wouldn’t let him in (he didn’t look as good as he used to in natural light, you ex-moirail, capitalism took its toll on him) and the patrons of a poorer establishment wouldn’t have much money to spend on him (he still liked expensive things, even if he couldn't afford them at all, unless they came in the form of pricey drinks in poison-fish colors).

The entrance was crammed, and you squeezed past the throng of bustling, protesting people after shoving a roll of coins into the bouncer’s hand, tugging on Sollux until he quit his sneering contest and followed you inside. 

Once you were past the door, the bubble of muffled noise popped. You were subgmerged in a sea of loud, enthusiastic blaring, thrumming and crashing; on your skin the air vibrated with the pounding of two thousand feet. The place was already packed, smelled of sugary liquor and salty sweat that assaulted your senses. The whole room was swarming with the physicality of it; you could almost taste it on the back of your tongue. 

When you turned to Sollux, the disco lights flashing on his glasses made him look like he’d dressed up for the occasion, he grimaced in the way that meant that when he went deaf for you, you'd better pity him.

You pointed in the direction of a free table, a rickety affair on questionable aluminum legs and its assorted stools, just now being vacated by a group of trolls. One of them wore their hair in a bright red wrap that might either be a proud disclaimer of their blood color or the mark of a Karkat fan; you couldn’t guess at the blood colors of the others, tinkling with jewellery among which their sigil must be tangled.

Sollux followed your gaze, and the corner of his lips quirked over his fangs. “Blood in the water, huh?”

“I know he’ll be here,” you told him. “We just need to wait.” 

“What if you don’t recognize him, with whatever he could be dressed like, and these grubfucking _lights_ ,” he said, with a jab of the chin at the gyrating strobes. “What if he runs when he sees you?”

“He won’t, I know he won’t,” you swore, and you were feeling the pull of the twin moons, and the brine-scented heat of the room, the algae used in some of the drinks being mixed, and - yes - someone must have cut their lip open dancing, or someone had a one-spade-stand and the staff hastily washed the traces away - faint in the air you could smell the ghost of blood. “It’s a sea-dweller thing,” you cut short, when Sollux didn’t look completely convinced. “And if I don’t recognize him, you’ll fin him for me.”

He looked at you with his head cocked, and breathed against your lips, “You’re a shark, Feferi,” before kissing you. When you broke apart, you searched for his eyes behind the reflective shells of his glasses.

“You still want to, right? I know you were in two minds about this...”

He squeezed your hand. “I want. It’s like you said: he’s ours.”

*

You looked for him, after you came back to life on a planet that had never been destroyed. 

You were lucky; you don’t know how the others remade the universe, exactly, but in this new iteration of your world it was a given that you knew Sollux and Kanaya, and they could explain a little about how the game had ended. New Alternia needed its Empress functioning, and your friends helped you make sense of almost eight-sweeps worth of memories you’d never lived. 

You were aware of it like of an eight-sweep long movie, _In Which A Young Magenta-Blood Troll Is Raised To One Day Inherit The Throne Of Her Home Planet, While Alternia Is On The Brink Of War With A Race Of Strangely-Colored, Hornless But Not Wholly Harmless Aliens; Affairs Of State Slowly Come Into Focus As The Troll Becomes Older, But Not So Much As To Overwhelm Our Adorable Yet Slightly Impulsive Protagonist Or Bore The Audience; There Is Much Quadrant Confusion, Including But Not Limited To Four Pale Crushes, Two Black-Red Double Reacharound Flips, Limited Auspiticing Between Non-Committed Trolls, Several Heartwarming Red Romances, Both Conciliatory And Concupiscent, And A Lukewarm Kismessissitude That Leaves Our Heroine Yearning For True Hatred; Etc._

Maybe the title to the life you never led would mention the heart trouble that laid you on an operation table when you were six. It left a big scar between your breasts; a burn, not a cut, but better than no scar at all.

You spent a long time looking for Eridan. He wasn’t in the memories of your new childhood, or Sollux’, or anyone else’s. Finally you heard word, through Sollux who had it from Terezi who’d pried it from Vriska, that he’d been Vriska’s moirail for two sweeps, but they’d drifted apart before her real memory kicked in. You rubbed the place where a burst of wwhite science had speared through you, and considered: Eridan, in a failed moiraillegiance, well, that was nothing new. 

“You’re not upset,” Sollux noted, watching you from behind his glasses.

You huffed, tossed your head back, and shrugged. “Relieved, actually,” you admitted.

“Yeah?”

“When I heard it was from Vriska, I thought...” you trailed off. It was a surprising thing, to realize how strongly you felt about someone.

“That maybe she’d tell you he was dead? Yeah, no. Even if ED wasn’t tho much of a nuithanthe of a bleediing nookthtaiin to do uth the favor, I don’t get the feeliing we’re going to die that easy this time around.” His accent came and went, full of incensed, gruff feeling when he talked about Eridan.

You took his hand. “No.” A breath. “I was afraid she’d say he’s her kismesis.”

When Sollux tracked him down, it was a sweep later and he was the last one still missing. Not that he was lost; Feferi Peixes was the Empress of New Alternia, and if he’d wanted to be found he’d just have needed to contact you. Or Sollux, or Karkat, or Aradia. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of your friends in highly visible positions. 

“I gueth the thinkpan donor thinkth he’th ‘off the grid’. What an embarrathment to the thpeciieth, I fucking tell you,” Sollux commented. 

Eridan was safe and alive and in the capitol city, and as you stared at the last known address of one “O. Jackson”, fury surged through you, making you itch for your trident. There was a picture, and it was unmistakably him; older now, leaner than suited him, and with an earfin that looked like it had been in a nasty disagreement with a ragged knife. 

The new world wasn't as kind to him as the old one had been. Maybe it appeased the cosmos’ idea of justice; it didn’t even start to touch on yours.

Now you know Eridan Ampora existed, traitor moirail, the would-be genocide, the killer of the heiress of the Alternian Empire, _your_ killer, you were not going to let him sink away into the sickening mediocrity he had chosen for himself. 

Not even brave enough to fucking do it and kill himself, he was too much of a fucking coward even for that, and he was letting this world do the job for him - _this_ world, the world your friends made almost exactly as you’d dreamt, with no drones to kill those too old or too sick or too inconvenient to serve the Empire, and the color of your blood didn’t define your place in society.

You’d spent sweeps cajoling him into not killing all the land-dwellers, and glub him if he thought you were gonna let him make your dream into a culling fork to use _against himself_. He deserved it if a troll ever did, but he was not _worth_ it. You wanted to find him, to explain to him how much he was not worth it, on his body.

You’d made this dream of a peaceful world against him, and you polished it against his fantasies of doomsday devices and blood-baths. By the time you were six you knew what you wanted by including into your vision systematically the side opposite to Eridan’s ravings.

This had the potential to be _your perfect world_ and no-one was going to sully it. ---Esperchially not him!

Your blood pounded in your earfins like the ocean grunting before a storm. 

You were going to find Eridan Ampora, you were going to have him, and you were going to make him understand he didn’t get away with killing the Matriorb, he didn’t get away with killing you, and he didn’t get away with pretending he was free to waste his life when his life should be your forfeit.

*

You knew who he was from the moment he stepped onto the dance floor. There were other sea-dwellers - you’d glimpsed at two pairs of gills exhibited in skimpy club outfits - but no-one danced like they were drowning. No-one else moved like they were an eel. 

You watched him pretend that he was just one in the throng, one silver fish in a school or one body like any other - maybe Sollux was thinking of bees. He was all long limbs and sleek and shine, blue and silvers like scales underwater. 

When you were kids he liked how thin he was, he thought it made him look elegant; now when you looked at him, you were reminded of Vriska, who was only ever attractive because of the crackling energy surrounding her ( _electricity_ was a truer word). There was the same halo streaming around him now, and that was the reason, you bet, for the trolls crowding him, rubbing wrists and legs. He was dangerous and they didn’t realize. He was good at that, your Eridan.

He noticed you undressing him with your eyes (the shimmery material of his top wasn’t quite transparent enough to let you see what was going around about his waist, but you’d have bet Vriska your trident there was a scar, like he was once chainsawed in two halves; you were imagining following it with your fangs) and he cocked his hips, twisted his body so you'd picture it twisting on sheets. Arrogant as fucking ever, at least, there was that. 

You wondered if he was going to keep up the charade when you nodded to him. Maybe he would yell for all to hear that the Empress was here, to ruin your night for good and earn himself fifteen minutes of fame.

He glided closer, swaying his skinny hips with his ugliest smirk affixed to his lips, and you fantasized about pushing his knees apart, plunging your fingers into his nook while Sollux held him still, until he screamed.

You breathed him in when he was against you. A tremble of tension coursed through his body, and as usual he disguised it with aggression. “Is it this hard for you to recognize everyone who’s killed you, Your Condescension?”

He was using your old title on purpose. A title, instead of your name, and the old wicked title no New Alternian record showed; a two-fold provocation, at that. Over Eridan’s shoulder, you saw Sollux smile. 

“How stupid do you think I am?” you whispered, like a secret.

He didn’t have an answer, or at least not fast enough before Sollux embraced him from behind, hands sliding around his waist like slotting into place. His pupils flared in the throbbing lights, even as his body relaxed, molded itself to your matesprit. 

“Sollux." There was no surprise in his tone, only a kind of breathless resignation.

“Yep,” Sollux said, matter-of-fact like every day included armfuls of squirming sea-dwellers panting under his touch, and not even all of them were you. He was looking straight at you over Eridan’s almost-naked shoulder. Slowly, without taking his eyes away from you, he leaned in and grazed Eridan’s fin with his fangs. Eridan didn’t make a move to stop him, just whined, high and breathy.

You pressed your thighs together, alight with want and hunger. 

“As if I wouldn’t know you,” you said, snorting at the thought, your attention directed to that tease of a shirt. “As if.”

That outfit was driving you crazy, how in your face and in your way, just like him, and you weren't sure if you wanted Eridan to keep it on the whole time or if you wanted to rip it off him right now.

“What the hell wwere you making eyes at me for, then?” he asked, poor insecure _needy_ thing that he was, gasping and grinding back against Sollux, so starved for touch he had never cared whether it was red or black or nothing at all.

Like he didn’t know where this came from, like he didn’t get that you might have reasons to hate him. 

You let him know, stroking the back of his neck to prevent yourself from clawing at it. “We all need to be our worst once in a while,” you murmured. Sometimes you thought it might be easier to just let go, be the monster Eridan grew up wanting to be. “You fucking owe me that.”

“That sounds an awful lot like a black solicitation, Fef,” he replied, like he didn’t even really believe it, like he was _flirting_. The only way to keep Eridan Ampora from running his mouth off with coddamn nonsense was to busy it with something better, so you kissed him.

He went liquid between your intertwined limbs, gasped like a drowning troll when you broke the kiss, just far enough that you could whisper and only he and Sollux would hear. “Sol has the bucket.”

Sollux’ hand found yours on Eridan’s waist, and you gripped each other, as you waited for his answer.

*

“Are you going to want to have him meet Aradia?” you asked in Sollux’ ear. 

You spoke quietly so Eridan wouldn't hear, but he was probably asleep. He was slumped bonelessly between the two of you, spent, head lolling on Sollux’s shoulder, propped against the wall while you waited for Karkat to come pick you up. Hair mussed, eye-shadow streaked, lipstick long gone, he looked exactly like he had been repeatedly pailed. 

Aside from that, there was not a cut or a bruise on him, nothing that could clue an observer that the encounter was caliginous - just the shadows of the twin hickeys you and Sollux sucked on each side of his throat. 

You stroked a tender thumb across the spot, and Eridan didn’t even react. Sollux made a noise in his throat, amused. 

“Guess we’ve given him a good reason to wear his douchey scarf,” he said, and looked up at you. “And I don’t know. Maybe. We’ve got time to think about it.”

That was a big assumption to make when Aradia was concerned, but you saw his point. For now, you were just kidnapping Eridan for the day; taking him back to the palace with you, and dumping him in your bed.

You couldn’t wait to see his face when he woke up and found that you’d marked him.


End file.
